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How Ukraine is holding its own against Russia — and changing warfare as we know it
When the Russia-Ukraine conflict erupted into full-scale war in 2022, things looked grim for Ukraine. Its capital, Kyiv, was under threat almost immediately, and there were questions about how long the smaller country could hold out, even with US support. More than four years later, however, the dynamic is changing. US military support has waned, but not only has Ukraine held its own in years of grinding, attritional fighting, it increasingly has Russia on the defensive.
According to Marcus Walker, who covers Ukraine as South Europe Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal, “it’s certainly possible for the smaller country to survive and have a chance of winning only because it is more nimble and and better at improvising and for large periods of the war has had the edge in terms of innovation.”
Walker, who, last month, reported on how the war is beginning to shift against Russian President Vladimir Putin, talked with Today, Explained co-host Noel King to explain how Ukraine has held on this long — and how it’s successfully improvising on the battlefield to press its advantage.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, including how Ukraine has recently gained a new ally on the American right who has Trump’s ear. You can listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
You recently wrote that Ukraine has Russia on its back foot. How?
To understand what happened this year, we have to go back to the very beginnings of the war, which were in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea and the Eastern Donbas region in a smaller-scale war. And, at the time, Ukraine was a militarily weak country. Its army was pretty backward and had outdated equipment; although, it fought as hard as it could. The society was politically divided, especially over its relationship with Russia and with the West and with Europe. And Russia seems to have drawn the lesson that Ukraine would be a pushover when it launched its full scale invasion in 2022. And, at the time, now four and a half years ago, even most Western governments and intelligence services thought that Russia would win the war easily.
Instead, the very fact of Russian pressure on Ukraine had somehow welded Ukrainians together and created a stronger, more united society and state that shared — whatever the internal differences — at least the determination to have a country called Ukraine. And, in the meantime, they did a lot of reforms to their country and to their military.
And so, when Russia launched a full scale invasion — thinking, “this will be easy,” — instead they found themselves in a full-scale war that they’ve been unable to win. On balance, Russia is really struggling to get any military result despite the investment of massive resources and the loss of incredible numbers of soldiers in trying to win this war. It just isn’t able to turn its advantage in numbers into victory.
Right now, it’s hard to see Ukraine collapsing. However, Ukraine’s a long way from winning outright. And the outcome of this war is ultimately still open.
Ukraine must be doing something right on the battlefield. What is it doing right?
It has found ways to counteract Russia’s advantage in numbers, in manpower, and in equipment. And, above all, the asymmetric war that Ukraine has been fighting has come to rely heavily on drones, on its know-how, and on its skill at improvisation to develop a new form of drone warfare that other countries around the world have been trying to learn from, including the US military, including Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, and including other NATO countries in Europe — and, of course, the Russians, too.
There is a constant arms race here in terms of drone technology and tactics. And both sides are now using incredible numbers of these often very tiny weapons — often 12 or 15 inches big with four little propellers — that can kill at ranges of 20 to 30 miles.
What is Ukraine using the drones to do, exactly?
They’re the most important tactical weapon at the front for killing Russian infantry. They are also using larger bomber drones with propellers or with wings to try and destroy Russian logistics, to blow up trucks transporting ammunition or other supplies on the supply roads far behind the front. They’re using long-range drones that can fly for a thousand miles or more to destroy Russian oil refineries deep inside Russia in an attempt to cut off the oil revenues that are vital for the Russian state and for Putin’s ability to finance the war.
On the front line, drones are also doing all sorts of work that humans used to do, such as transporting ammunition, and food, and water to infantry soldiers on the front line. So, if you go to frontline areas now, or anywhere near them, you can see ground drones: little remote-control vehicles with big chunky wheels trundling along on their own with no human in sight.
They also, for example, evacuate wounded Ukrainian soldiers. They will lie down on these ground drones and be ferried out, because that is better than having six men carry you out on a stretcher where, if you’re hit again, then you might have seven casualties.
How did Ukraine end up using drones in so many areas — and so successfully? Is this just weaponry evolving the way it tends to?
Obviously, in all wars, innovation happens very fast under the pressure of necessity. But there is something very particular about Ukraine. It is a country of people who like to improvise. It’s also a country with a large software sector, a large IT sector. And it’s a place where large parts of the military have a culture of, as we journalists sometimes put it, trying to MacGyver solutions. You take what you have, and you improvise.
It so happened that the drone revolution started with consumer drones, the same kind of quadcopters that people were using to take pictures on holiday. And they worked out ways to attach a claw to them that can then drop a grenade or strap some explosives to it and crash the whole drone into a Russian vehicle. That was how it began at the start of this war in 2022. But, now, these things have become really a deadly fleet of flying killer robots that saturate the frontline area.
Of course, the Russians are doing the same. So, on both sides of the front line, it has become extremely difficult and dangerous to move under a sky full of these killer robots.
I was reading this weekend that Ukraine has been using drones to target warehouses for this company called Wildberries. It’s kind of like Amazon for Russia. What’s the strategy there?
There are a couple of aspects to that. One is that Wildberries has also been selling a large amount of military gear, such as body armor or drone components. It’s more like an Amazon from which the soldiers can order a lot of gear to continue the war, so it is a way of disrupting military logistics.
But, also, it strikes a blow to Russian civilian perceptions of the war, because, for years, Putin tried to tell the Russian population that this war is something happening far away, and it wouldn’t touch them directly. Now, it turns out that their equivalent of Amazon deliveries are not going to be arriving, because the warehouse burned down.
At the same time, it’s a way of damaging the Russian economy, because Wildberries also owes a lot of money to banks. And so, if the company is in trouble, then it also causes trouble for the Russian banking system. And it hurts the tax revenues of the Russian government that pay for the war.
Is Russia showing evolution on the battlefield, as well?
Yes, they have. They have also come up with their own innovations. For example, in the last couple of years, since about 2024, they’ve been using large numbers of drones on fiber optic cables. That means the pilot that’s flying them is attached via a long thin plastic cable or fiber optic cable to a drone that carries a spool and is unspooling this cable as it flies. Now, what does that do? It means that electronic interference with the radio signal is no longer possible, because there is a physical connection between the pilot and the drone. So, that was an innovation that bypassed electronic warfare or the interception of the radio signal of the video feed that pilots need to fly their drones.
They’ve had other innovations too. The Russians last year, for example, came up with a whole new class of medium-range drones — cheap, fixed-wing drones. The Ukrainians have now responded and made their own versions, which are better, but it really is a constant race of innovation and adaptation. And every time I come back and talk to military units here, everything’s changed. The tactics that worked last year no longer work. And the drones that work now didn’t exist three months ago.
Is there some possibility that Ukraine can win this war by not losing it?
Yes. Winning in war means achieving political war aims. And Ukraine’s aim is to survive as an independent nation state. It can do that. It can achieve that even if it loses currently about 20 percent of its territory that’s under Russian occupation.
I think it’s hard to see how Russia can achieve its own central war aim, which was to reimpose political control over Ukraine to turn it into a kind of protectorate — really to take back control of the place that was once Russia’s largest colony. It’s very hard to see how the Russians can achieve that. The Russians seem to be counting on the West, on the US and the Europeans getting tired of supporting Ukraine, of sending financing and loans and weaponry. Putin seems to believe that, without this international support from the West, Kyiv won’t be able to carry this on forever.
